Orest Slepokura writes from Alberta on Committing Insecticide DEBORAH Lipstadt’s reference to your person as a “bug” and a “fly” and her adversarial relationship with you as matter of “pest control” ( Asian Times , April 18, 2000) recalls other uses of such insect metaphors employed by her co-religionists to describe their opponents. There are several precedents. Here are just a couple.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir , at the opening of a West Bank tourist site, on rioting Palestinians: “We say to them from the heights of this mountain and from the perspective of thousands of years of history that they are like grasshoppers compared to us” ( Newsweek , April 11, 1988, page 21).
General Rafael Eitan , the onetime Israeli military Chief of Staff, was somewhat more vicious when he referred to Palestinians under siege as “cockroaches in a bottle” ( New York Times , August 5, 1985, page 1). See: It is not at all unusual. Indeed, Abba Eban has decried the use of such ugly metaphors for being (ironic, what!) the “language of extermination.”
Sincerely yours, Orest Slepokura avid Irving’s books:–> bookmark this page to find new downloads David Irving replies: I TASTELESSLY referred in one May 1993 speech in Bow, East London, to the Board of Deputies of British Jews as “cockroaches”, in view of their behind-the-skirting-boards methods of destroying publishers and authors.
That of course was “vicious anti-semitism”, in the eyes of Mr Justice Gray (although the context was explained to him); the defence had incidentally re-dated the speech in which I made the remark to May 1992, before the Board’s secret onslaught on my name began — a clear case of manipulation.